Origa.me

A few years ago I bought a pair of Aiwa headphones with a built-in MP3 player. They were only 128MB but they were very cheap (factory refurbished) and they looked so cool that I figured I might as well get them and if they didn't work out in their original form, I could just transplant a bigger MP3 player into them.

Good job I'd considered them not working as intended because Aiwa (being owned by Sony) have produced a typically great looking and high quality piece of hardware which is completely ruined by their awful proprietary software. The only way I could get music on to them using Linux or Mac was to do a real-time recording session from my laptop's headphone socket to the line-in socket on the phones ... Madness!! Anyway, they went in the project box for future attention and there they stayed due to a lack of the funds needed to purchase the intended donor MP3 player - an original iPod shuffle.

Roll on another year and I find myself using my Palm PDA for MP3 player duties and not actually that excited by the thought of getting a separate player after all, so I ended up getting myself a pair of original Logitech Bluetooth headphones instead. These support A2DP for audio streaming from any bluetooth device which supports that profile - only my PDA at the moment (with the appropriate software) - and the headphones came with a dongle which connects to any 3.5mm headphone socket. My MacBook should also do A2DP without the dongle when Leopard is released apparently.

I had read several reports that this particular model of headphones was prone to splitting across the neck band but, again, they were very cheap and I figured that I could always stick them into my Aiwa headphones if that happened - which it promptly did. So, I grabbed my soldering iron, drill, file and other 'tools of the trade' and set about my own personal blending of Logitech's rather excellent internals with Aiwa's rather fine-looking hardware ... to produce ... these:

I'm sure you'll agree they look great and I can assure you they work well and sound great too!

_{Sorry about the lack of 'in-progress' photos btw - this project kind of happened all of a sudden and I forgot until I'd finished, by which time it was too late!}